Changes To Spawn

The signs at the Player Market & Spawn have been replaced with ComputerCraft screens, not only does it look nicer but it gives me more flexibility with the layout and makes them easier to update :)

They also include some details on the new ranks which are coming very soon!

Scheduled Maintenance & Server Downtime

Woke up this morning to find the server back down again and this update from our hosting company:

23:16 - ... still offline, but Cisco technician is currently looking into the issue onsite.

We are extremely sorry for the downtime that occurred today and we know that it was totally unacceptable for this to happen.

Best Regards,
Nitrous Networks LTD

Whatever the routing issue is seemingly the Cisco technician is still working on it now and around one third of the servers they host are currently down due to the connectivity issue, unfortunately we are in that one third.

I'll keep checking for new information and time-scales and update here, thanks for your patience.

UPDATE: 09:40 - Still waiting to hear from the hosting company.

UPDATE: 10:40 - Still waiting to hear from the hosting company.

UPDATE: 11:40 - Still waiting to hear from the hosting company.

UPDATE: 12:40 - Cisco are still working on the problem and our hosting company have offered a partial refund of the hosting fees as compensation, unfortunately no update on when the servers might be back up though.

UPDATE: 13:40 - Waiting to hear from the hosting company.

UPDATE: 15:00 - Still waiting to hear from the hosting company.

UPDATE: 16:05 - Hosting company hope to have servers back up today but can't specify a time.

UPDATE: 17:00 - Waiting to hear from the hosting company.

UPDATE: 17:30 - Our hosting companies managing director is saying that the servers should be back upin about an hour, fingers crossed!

UPDATE: 18:35 - No sign of the server coming up yet, waiting for an update.

UPDATE: 19:15 - Apparently the issues with the new hardware are now completely resolved and servers have been coming back online one by one over the last 20-25 minutes, we shouldn't have long to wait now. I'll be whitelisting for about 5 minutes just to check a few things.

UPDATE: 20:25 - Looks like our server is going to be one of the last to come back up, they are seemingly being manually connected one by one to check for any issues which is why it's taking so long.

UPDATE: 21:25 - Still waiting, but hopefully not for much longer! The servers that have come back up already seem stable now so looking good.

UPDATE: 21:40 - Server is back up! Whitelist is in place for a few minutes whilst I check things over.

UPDATE: 21:45 - Whitelist removed! The server is coming up now and seems stable.

Scheduled Maintenance & Server Downtime

The server has been down for a few minutes now as part of the scheduled maintenance by our hosting company, hopefully we will be back and running within the next twenty minutes or so. I have turned the whitelist on and stopped the server as it came up and went down a couple of times and I don't want to risk world corruption.

I'll keep you posted!

UPDATE: 17:30 - Upgrades are taking longer than expected, might take another 20 minutes.

UPDATE: 17:55 - Server back up! Looks like the upgrades are complete :)

UPDATE: 18:55 - Server back down :(  No news on how long for yet.

UPDATE: 19:30 - Still waiting to here from the hosting company.

UPDATE: 20:15 - Still waiting to here from the hosting company.

UPDATE: 21:00 - Still waiting to here from the hosting company.

UPDATE: 21:40 - Server is now essentially back up but whitelisted while I check things.

UPDATE: 22:00 - Daily backup performed & seems stable, whitelist removed!

Well that was a pain, everything seems ok now, all I know is that all the MineCraft servers they host (thousands) went down so it was a network wide issue. They've been coming back online one rack at a time and are mostly back up but it will be an hour or two before everything is fully up and running, hopefully their will be no further downtime during that time.

Player Market Now Open!

Over the last week many users have requested some form of player market and so I decided to make building one a priority, it's taken a couple of days to build and test but I'm pleased to announce that the player market is now open!

Key market information:

The market is located outside spawn, opposite the DiggyStore.

The market consists of 18 rentable stalls.

Stall rentals and equipment are provided free of charge.

Each stall consists 3 trade-o-mats linked to personal safes and a sign to be placed above them.

Any player of 'Member' rank or above may request rental of a market stall.

Stall renters are responsible for ensuring they do not trade in banned or restricted items

Stalls will be reclaimed if the renting player does not log in to the server for 7 days.

Stalls will also be reclaimed if a renter is found to have deliberately tricked another player into an unfair trade.

If you want to rent a stall but no admin or mod is online then please send an e-mail to admin@diggyminecraft.co.uk, including your username and a proffered stall number (if applicable).

I think that covers everything, enjoy!

Scheduled network maintenance

I just received this notification from our hosting company regarding the network upgrades and some scheduled maintenance taking place tomorrow:

Hello everyone,

Just a quick note to let you all know that starting at around 4:30PM tomorrow (09/03/2013) we will be conducting some network maintenance so you may experience downtime of up to 5 minutes and the maintenance should be complete by 5:30PM.

During the maintenance period tomorrow we will be doing the following:-
+ Installing new 48 port gigabit switches into all 3 of our racks
+ Installing another uplink to all 3 racks to double our uplink capacity from 1Gbps to 2Gbps for each rack
+ Configuring some new security settings to aid stability in the occurrence of a denial of service attack

After all these upgrades are complete we should have a much more stable network with a lot less downtime because of disruptions from DoS / DDoS attacks.

We would just like to thank each and every one of you for staying patient whilst we've been planning and rolling out these upgrades.

Kind Regards,
Nitrous Networks Ltd.

Network Upgrades

Our hosting company is carrying out further network upgrades over the next couple of days so we may experience random disconnects and short drop-outs during this time, please bear with us, it will be worth it in the long-run as the upgrades are aimed at greater stability, resilience and preventing DDoS attacks.

I'll post an update once the work is complete.

Thanks!